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EFF and Dvorak Blame the Digg Revolt On Lawyers
enharmonix writes "A bit of an update on the recent Digg revolt over AACS. The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form. I was pleased to see the similarity to 2600 and deCSS was not lost on the Times either. More interesting is that the EFF's Fred von Lohmann blames the digg revolt on lawyers. And in an opinion piece, John Dvorak expands on that theme."
esp. the business/IP type.. but don't the EFF have/employ a lot of lawyers?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Blame the lawyers instead of figuring out a reasonable approach to DRM that doesn't burden the consumers while protecting the producers. The worst part is that some of these now blamed lawyers will run for Congress to make a bigger mess.
...that trying to issue a thousands of DMCA take down notices is the fastest way to proliferate something :)
Oh yeah and the fact that DMCA take down notices only apply to servers in the US.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Was Digg ever given a takedown notice? I haven't followed this since the original flap over it, but at the time it seemed like Digg cowered at the idea that maybe they could get in legal trouble (or lose an advertiser).
When Digg changed their tune, some users rejoiced that Digg was now going to fight for them, possibly at the cost of the site. Digg even made a solemn pronouncement that they were taking some brave and bold step. But there was never any evidence of any fight. If there was a threat or takedown notice, Digg should have posted that.
Dvorak's wrong, at least about one thing. AACS does absolutely nothing to stop us from copying the discs. So called 'copy protection' is the biggest joke of the whole DRM movement. All that AACS accomplishes is making it difficult for people who have legitimately purchased discs from watching them on their linux-powered media centers.
Somebody should write the NYTimes a letter and let them know that the code is just the code you need to play the movies you own and paid for. Piracy doesn't figure into it at all.
Dvorak is making sense.
In situations like this it is not always correct to blame the lawyers and to give the company that hired the lawyers a free pass on the blame. These companies have in house intellectual property divisions charged with protecting the company's assets. Those corporate minions hire the lawyers and give them a job to do. The lawyers are more than happy to do what they have been asked to do, and generally there is not a whole lot of leeway on the implementation of that job. If the company wants to avoid bad press, then it ought to reconsider its options, legal and otherwise, available to it and change its strategy.
I think it is on slashdot because the whole Digg revolt is actually showing a new socio-political form of protest, bringing civil disobedience into the virtual world. Before you would have to show up to a rally, carry a big sign, shout and chant stuff and then get beat up by police with nightsticks, peppersprayed, shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed, ect... but who has the time or energy for that these days.
Sit at home, find a piece of info that some company does not want the world to know and post it onto a site like Digg, Slashdot or some other popular site and kick back and watch the fireworks. The reason it is/was so successful was because of the response it got from AACS-LA, they issued hundreds or thousands of DMCA take-down notices. If it looked like they did not give a crap then odds are high that nothing would have happened.
This is 100% the result of a big bad corporation deciding to try and stomp on the rights of the consumers and citizens and in this case instead of laying down and taking their beating like a good citizen is supposed to they stood up and gave AACS-LA a kick in the balls. Trying to censor something is the quickest way to make sure everyone knows about it.
Plus sometimes it takes a childish tantrum to get people to take a look at a real problem (DMCA)
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The AACS is not a 'copy prevention' or 'copyright protection' code. It has always been possible to copy a DVD and it still is. The AACS is an 'anti fair use' code. As such, it has *nothing* to do with the DMCA.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm appalled that this massive breach of our nation's finest law is being blamed on the good men and women of the legal profession. /sarcasm
Haiku for you!
It's clear what the people want. So why does the law dictate the opposite?
Everyone's so busy looking at copyright and missing the bigger picture! Our 'democracy' doesn't work.
you digg your own grave rather than rob anothers.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
There are lots of people with opinions that they believe are absolutely correct, no two ways about it. That doesn't make it necessarily so.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Makes a damn good keyboard layout though
I though it was more along the digg wasn't paid to adjust reality and they are fighting to retain their right to sell the ability to mould their forum posters opinions. Like google they only censor and mod up for profit, never ever for free ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Wait a minute - Dvorak says to blame the lawyers??
Oh my... I am so conflicted..... who do I complain about?
Oh, right - Microsoft!
Three Squirrels
Slashdot wants to glean as much advertising revenue as it can: That is its mandate ever since it was bought out.
Since Digg has a larger audience now, it is in Slashdot's best interest to do what it can to lure traffic from there, and other more popular sites, so as to drive up revenue.
That is why this is mentioned here.
And, it's NOT a bad thing! We can withstand the occassional swarm of "Diggiots", I think, if it will help generate money for Slashdot, right?
Once this article fades into obscurity, we can go back to our normal discussions: You know - why copyright infringement is a bad thing, if it's something GPL'd, but it's OK, if it's a "big nasty, greedy corporation".
Or, why we should all collectively bow down before Apple, as the more vociferous fanbois don kneepads and jockey for position in the long line that has been formed here to suck Steve Jobs' aging dick.
Then, we'll get to do it all over again, when the "editors" dupe the articles.
This isn't just a matter of one party making a civil threat against another; the government is neck-deep in their involvement. By passing a law as bizarre as DMCA, which the people didn't even ask for, they've outlawed certain types of speech. Argue the merit of censorship, but don't say it's not.
BTW, the NY Times writer is an MPAA-apologist:
(And he makes at least two other references to the crypto being an "anti-piracy" measure.) Anti-piracy is very likely a large part of the motivation for the creation of this system, but as it clearly serves the much more general function of "limiting access." To let things like- Preventing many Fair Uses
- Preventing access to the work even after it has entered Public Domain in the future
- Controlling the player market(!)
all fall under the umbrella of "preventing piracy" is a pretty distorted way to report the news. If NYT wants to take sides and promote a certain agenda, that's their right, but they should get called on it.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Will you have me believe that the explosion of p2p mp3 sharing had nothing to do with a) the proliferation of broadband, and b) free music? That if the RIAA hadn't gone on a massive lawsuit campaign, no one would want free music?
Well, I think that you are full of it.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Just like any other professionals.
Although I hate them as much as the next guy, they did not cause this mess.
This mess is caused by out-dated business models, corrupt legislation, impunity and progress, amongst other factors that have historically caused civil disobedience.
To blame the lawyers is not only a cliché, it is confusing the issue.
Lawyer language can be aggressive, but when you bring in lawyers it means you have already tried nicely.
It couldn't have been a DMCA "we own the copyright, now take it down" takedown notice, because those only apply to copyrightable works.
What probably happened was Digg got a letter saying, "You have posted a DRM circumvention tool. If you don't remove it, we will sue your testicles into the stratosphere."
It's different from a takedown notice, but it had the same effect.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It is clearly a hyporcracy since, for instance blacks were hardly receiving the "liberty and justice for all" until very recently and many people do not at present. Say it enough and you don't doubt it. That those liberties and justice don't exist hardly matters - people still believe they have them.
Sure, USA is better than China etc, but to be the world leader in freedom that USA claims to be it should be ranking a bit higher than 15/11 on http://www.worldaudit.org/press.htm
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I just looked back over the past few days on digg.com, and could find no evidence of this HD-DVD keyposting. Have digg said 'we won't censor any more posts', and then censored all the posts, or what?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
So the point of the article is that Digg's own lawyers made the call to take down the key. Due to Digg's own actions, without any notice from AACS or whoever, this key is famous. So basically if the AACS group wants to nail anybody, they'll hit Digg. In addition, Digg has lost a ton of street cred with its user base. Clearly whoever made the call or accepted the lawyer's advice didn't make the right decision, because it really screwed them. They could've been just one more site hosting the key, but instead they are the main offenders.
Viva la revolucion!
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
Of course there are gray areas in "freedom of speech". For example, the United States has often equated giving money to a candidate as "speech". I personally disagree that the right to give arbitrary money to a candidate is equal to the right of free expression or even association, but it's certainly debatable. There's also the question of intent-- you may be free to say anything and not be locked up for the speech, but be locked up because the speech implied intent or guilt in another matter entirely. Depending on how silly and "thought-crime"esque other laws are, it may seem like it's speech itself that is being impinged.
Anyway, nothing is black and white, and especially not something as rich as speech.
In any case, in case this article leads anyone to any undue optimism, you can go read ABC news' editorial on the matter to bring you back down again (or to make your blood boil, depending on your temperament).
E pluribus unum
Check out this quote:
> Some people believe that such systems unfairly limit their freedom to listen to music and watch movies on whatever devices they choose.
What the is that? Could they maybe cite one of many sources who will freely give that opinion? Fox pioneered this terrible technique of interjecting their own opinion via the construct "Some say...", and it's terrible journalism. I imagine this article was written off the cuff, but just give the EFF or anyone else a buzz for a quick quote.
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
Most large corporations send in the lawyers from the start as an intimidation tactic.
publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.
He not only distorts the aim of digital restrictions, he's advertising and promoting newer movie formats. People who use MPAA language aid the MPAA whether they want to or not. The easiest way to foil the "anti-piracy" talk is to point out the failure of DeCSS. Commercial shops will have no problem making and selling exact coppies. Exact coppies can also be made and sent over the internet by normal users. Encryption and restrictions serve only to thwart fair use.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. If you're not allowed to do that, then you do not truly have freedom of speech.
What if the theater REALLY is on fire?!
That example is NOT about freedom of speech, but about property rights.
i.e.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/003070.asp
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Disney owns ABC. Disney makes movies that may be affected by the breaking of disc encryption schemes. Thus we probably won't hear anything of any value from ABC News on this matter, due to their inherent bias. And as we expect, the article you link to is essentially poop.
Also, see:
Ethics of Liberty, 15. "Human Rights" as Property Rights
The first amendment can be interpreted many ways. Personally, I think that they mean "freedom of speech, so long as it doesn't harm others". Yelling Fire in a crowded movie theater is a very likely way to get someone hurt. Other than something like this, however, I feel freedom of speech means anything. This includes slander. I should be able to say "George Bush had sex with 15 men last night, no doubt about it" and not catch any shit for it.
:(){
That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.
Maybe theres a distinction to be made between 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of yelling'?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The more they push, the harder we push back.
That summarizes it pretty well too.
They pushed very hard with the thousands of DCMA take downs and we pushed back, taking out a popular site in the process.
It occurs to me that if Digg and its ilk can be dealt "take down" notices for carrying a particular representation of data, then that situation could also be turned around.
Suppose, for example, that someone's Valuable Intellectual Property were, through pure coincidence, protected by the key "sony.com", by the contents of http://www.riaa.com/ or by the image of Mickey Mouse?
How in the world is it censorship to try an maintain private information? This community is hypocritical.
>That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. If you're not allowed to do that, then you do not truly have
>freedom of speech.
If the theatre happens to be on fire, then you will probably have the gratitude of the people within.
If the theatre happens to NOT be on fire, you may face consequences at the hands of those same people.
In no case was "yelling fire" illegal. However, intentionally causing a panic and creating a public nuisance, *is* illegal.
On the other hand, the allusion to yelling fire was meant to illustrate the basis for a doctrine that a compelling state interest existed that could justify the suppression of certain activities that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. In particular, "yelling fire" was an example used in a case that ruled it illegal to distribute flyers opposing the military draft during WWI. I think it is also important to understand that this ruling was overturned, which probably means it *is* legal to protest against a draft during wartime.
If you experiment with "yelling fire", you will probably find that no law actively suppresses your right to do it, and you will also almost certainly find that no law protects you from the ass kicking you receive as a result -- or from the harsh manner in which you are removed from the theatre by its proprietor or the police.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was helping to establish what rights were, and to what extent the expression of one's rights were allowed to abridge the rights of others.
Today, the test for whether first amendment protections my be abridged on any activity, is if the state can argue that it is intended to, and will likely incite "imminent lawless action", a stricter standard than the "clear and present danger" which had existed before 1969. Essentially the government may "place time, place and manner" restrictions on First Amendment activities, if it can argue that the activities are likely to cause a riot.
For what it's worth, I do believe the Federal Government has clearly failed to adhere to this standard on numerous occasions.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>That example is NOT about freedom of speech, but about property rights.
Actually, the "yell fire in a theatre" idiom was used as an example to justify the government's authority to suppress a person's right to hand out flyers opposing the WWI draft.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
that's the best descriptive phrase I have read all year so far, thanks!
"exploit ignorance through rampant douchebaggery"
SCO?
Money is the root of all evil?
13256278887989457651018865901401704640 is mine mine mine it's like an 718624318471594843*2^64 + 15582831591453788352 which is also mine.
Those sequences of 8887 are especially nice and to finish on 640, well WHO needs more than that.
I give you permission to use it under the terms of the GPLv3 or a separate license where you agree to pay me 95% of all revenue.
There's nothing hypocritical about this.
This is about a secret number. This number is, well, a number. You can't own a number. No number is a secret unto itself. That they use it as the key for their cryptography, that's the secret they want to keep private. Unfortunately for them, the number was available to anyone with a disk, a drive, and the right software. Someone was bound to tell. They tried to un-share the secret by squelching the mention of the number, not the association with their cryptography. That's censorship.
It's a popular topic here for a number of reasons, including:
There's a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.
Frankly I think this whole protect-the-media-empire-profits mode the government has gotten into lately is treason against the people and the Republic. It's an example of legislation for hire. It's an erosion of civil rights to protect the unearned profits on Steamboat Willie. It is vile. But that's just my opinion.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Anonymous Cowards blame Dvorak and Lawyers on bad breeding...
dmsuperman is a child molester. He routinely kidnaps young boys and anally rapes them. He also kills hookers for fun.
Dvorak knew but didn't say it explicitly. Why else he would use the word: fiaSCO ?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
It's a classic case of inmates running the asylum.
All I see is lawyers generating more work for lawyers. They are not stupid - of course they know that there is no way anyone can keep the lid on this, which suits them perfectly.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Dvorak was NOT referring to the lawsuits that have been filed by the **AA for the last couple of years. Cast your mind back just few years prior to that..
./ Once the lawsuits hit the press, almost everyone with a computer had at least one bit of filesharing software on it (and, depending on the p2p application, became another system on somone's botnet).
Does the term "Napster" ring a bell? The "original" p2p application? The one that was eventually forced to shut down by Metallica, Dr. Dre, etc? THOSE are the lawsuits he's referring to.
Prior to Napster (and the massive press coverage the lawsuits garnered), I would not be surprised to learn that the only people who were even aware of the terms MP3, file sharing or p2p could probably all be found here on
All the threats are tempest in a teapot. The AACS-LA claims that the key is a component of a copy protection circumvention mechanism. The problem with that theory, is that by the time the key was published widely, it was already revoked. As the key was no longer valid, it really can't be said to be part of a circumvention system. Which just makes all the threatening letters all that much more brainless. Dvorak didn't know just how right he was.
I love the comments that the lawyers didn't cause this - the law did.
WHO DO YOU THINK WRITES THE LAWS?
Look at the prior professions of your congressmen and women.
-l
Ah, yes, "The music industry is decimated". LOL.
Now I know that it meant something different back in the Roman times, from which we inherited the word, but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic. You know, massive destruction. As in, "the population of Europe was decimated by the plague in the late middle ages." (When some documented outbreaks wiped out as much as 80% of a city's population, and, as statistics flukes often work, some smaller villages saw 100% deaths and became ghost villages.)
Did the music industry suffer anything even remotely callable "decimation". On what data do you or Dvorak base such statements? All the sales data I've seen indicated a steady, but relatively unspectacular decline in number of CDs sold, not some devastating dive at the end of Napster. And it becomes even less so when you consider how many people bought at least one track from an album on, say, iTunes, as basically the equivalent of one CD sale lost. Those people poached the one track that interested them, and are not gonna buy the whole CD now.
And let's be serious for a minute. If you think teenagers will start protesting DMCA en masse instead of trying to be fashionable among their peers, I have a nice waterfront property in Sahara to sell. Are you interested? I mean, heh, seriously, 90% of the high school population lives, dresses, eats and buys music based 100% on peer tastes. Even if they go for the rebellious independent teenager image, it's the exact image that their peers want to see. If among their peers it's fashionable to be a Britney Spears fan and have all her albums, that's what they'll do.
"There is no data that says otherwise"... actually, there is plenty.
1. Even if Napster went down, other P2P networks exist and existed. And by all estimates I've seen, the usage is rising steadily. Plus both pre- and post-napster there were pirate websites, ftp sites, binaries newsgroups, etc. What was so special about Napster among them? Why would piracy on Napster improve sales, but piracy on other networks cause sales to drop? Because that's what you're asking me to believe there, if Napster's death was single-handedly responsible for decimating the music business.
2. Last I've heard, most of the decline pre- or post-Napster also suspiciously correlated for a long while with a decline in the number of albums published. You don't need a conspiracy to start wondering about cause and effect there. Let's say Moraelin Music Inc publishes 20 albums in one year, and rakes 20 million dollars in sales. Then next year it publishes 19 albums and the sales dip to 19 million dollars. Hmm... Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
3. How about the correlation with iTunes and the other online music shops that I've mentioned earlier? Unlike pirating a song, which makes most people feel slightly guilty, this time it's an officially bought song. No reason to go buy the CD too. And it went a long way towards killing the album. While previously the music companies would sell you a whole CD, now you can poach individual tracks, for a tenth of the cost. Do you see how that would cause a loss of $$ in sales? And then there were sites like Allofmp3, which didn't even pay the music companies a cent, but allowed some people to put a "well, then copyright is their problem, not mine, I bought the song" blanket over their conscience anyway.
Or in other words, Dvorak is, as usual, talking out the ass. His job as a tech pundit is to sound all smart, and tell the readers what they want to hear. Or at least some outlandish prediction. It's a short-story writer job, not some real all-knowing oracle. And if you've read some of his other pieces (e.g., the now infamous whine about how the Windows idle process is eating up 99% of his CPU power), he's... a helluval less than all-knowing. In fact, he's an outright idiot.
So be a smart guy and don't base your understanding of the world on his clueless rants. I'm sure you can find better sources of information.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I thought the key was a component of the encryption tool. Which sort of makes it a component of the decryption tool. Being used by numerous appliances that can actually play this sort of content...
I use the letter "A" as encryption key for my specially made barf-cough-hack CD, so now I'm sueing pretty much everyone because they're using the letter "A" in publications about my CD.
Hmm. Yups! Profit!
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
So kids, the lesson is to push softly and be patient. That way, no one will notice 100 years down the road that you've taken total control.
Are those lawyers still working? It won't last too long.
People don't want to blame lawyers!
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
is that lawyers should consider their client's best interests before suing. Sometimes, he says, it may not be doing them any good to sue.
Ummm. I can just see the scene....
Lawyers office in a swanky part of town. A client enters.
"Hi, Bill. I have a problem. Some punk kid is publishing my copyrighted programs."
"Ok, John, we'll get right on it"
Two days later.....
"Hi, John, this is Bill, of Bill, Harry and Williams. We looked at your problem for a few days, checked out some history around this sort of thing, and came to the conclusion that you'd be better off just sitting down and putting up with it. That's $20,000 you owe us. Prompt payment would be appreciated."
Which "popular site" did you take out? Far as I can tell, D*gg is still up and running.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Exactly. Big corporations that want to censor some piece of information should really read up on the Streisand Effect.
Monkey muffins. I'm tired of seeing Dvorak's name featured in Slashdot stories. Credibility zero, whether he's close to the mark or not.
What's your obsession with *? "Digg" not "D*GG"
Seriously, wtf?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
From memory, I believe the original meaning behind the word 'decimation' come from the old military practice of, if your troops don't behave (not brave enough, not following orders, not getting the job done), you line them up and kill one tenth yourself, as a message to the rest to work harder. So the idea that it means something "more brutal today" is insane.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Will you have me believe [that] if the RIAA hadn't gone on a massive lawsuit campaign, no one would want free music?
Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly promoted the mp3 explosion and turned a grubby fringe business (yes, business: Napster, Kazaa, pretty much all the early P2P music apps I can think of were closed-source commercial packages) into an edgy and exciting Robin-Hood open-source movement.
"Digg has lost a ton of street cred "
When nerdy white boys say "street cred", it makes you laugh out loud.
The reason this is not an issue of free expression is that the number, in itself, is meaningless. It has not intellectual or expressive content. It is merely a secret, and nothing more. Most people advocating the spreading of this number acknowledge the right of private parties to have secrets. They are mortified when sloppy IT practices expose social security numbers.
Does it make a difference why we say the takedown efforts are bad? I think it does. Framing the issue this way claims too much and too little. It claims a right to publish secrets that come into our hands, an idea most of us don't endorse. It claims too little, because the it obscures what is at stake: preventing private industry from taking control of cultural and political discourse using laws designed to encourage expression.
In other words, we must not allow the consortium to confuse the means and ends here. The average person will see clearly enough that the number is merely a secret, and secrets are legally protected as part of our right of privacy. It is the use to which the secret is put that is pernicious to individual freedom. The industry cannot assert it has suffered a loss of privacy with "clean hands". The takedowns are not censorship, they are protecting the means of censorship. The publications are not free expression, they are protecting the means of free expression.
Publishing the number is an act of civil disobedience. Again Thoreau has something important to say here:
This is marvelously apt to the issue of copy protection. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. The injury that AACS does to individual freedom comes from the power of the state. Furthermore, it prevents the public from experiencing and therefore understanding their rights of free use. Ultimately, it may cripple free political discourse itself, as the machinery of control becomes ubiquitous, and the means for evading control remain illegal.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I need to run and email the AACS-LA people. I don't in any way want to promote the distribution of this evil number, so I'll modify my blogging software to automatically delete it if a user happens to post it.
I'm sure their lawyers will be more than happy to provide me with the code for this worthy pursuit.
Just to be sure, maybe I'll delete every string of 256 bits that could possibly be XORed with another to yeild this naughty number.
Mike Wallace of CBS News (Ret.) was doing that for decades on 60 Minutes long before Fox News.
Maybe h*s keyboard *s broke.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
1. If the "numbers" posted were someone's credit card number, the loud-mouths wouldn't have reacted the same.
2. Digg is a private operation and are free to post or remove whatever they want. Call it censorship, call it doing business, it's their site, their rules.
The tighter you squeeze, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
The humorous part of the whole takedown notice thing, was the list of pages to be taken down...one of which was /09-9f.....html
So, then, they have to issue a takedown notice for the takedown notice...which I gather they didn't bother to do.
Seriously, come on Dvorak, get you're head out of your ass. Are you next going to tell me the cops created the LA riots? The lawyers were trying to litigate, it's what they were going to do. Nothing to surprising. Anything about the MPAA or RIAA is always going to get little rebel johnny's panties in a twist because he wants to be different and fight the establishment... with everyone else. It doesn't matter if the lawyers litigated or not.
The blame for the Digg revolt lands on two groups. The users and the site admins, they were the direct cause for it. If the admins didn't start censoring the numbers posts the users wouldn't have tried to be so clever to post it again. If they had adequate screening tools they might have at least stemmed some of the flood. The lawyers might not have told Digg to censor it and they could have banned it for another reason and the revolt would have happened along another line.
On the other hands the only people actually involved in the revolt are the users. You can go blame anyone else but the users were the ones posting the number. Just because someone else buys a guy, and another person loads it but puts the safety on, if a third person takes that gun turns off the safety and shoots someone, it's the fault of the third person, not the first two people. This country has a complex of "who's fault is it" and we seem to always ignore the person who did the crime/action.
The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form.
Well, everyone knows that the NYT is nothing but Far Left Loonies.
They hate the USA & hence they publish such stuff.
What say you?
- Bill'O'R
I could understand the decision to remove the decryption key from articles that were irrelevant to the subject of HD-DVD encrytion itself; even if it were an act of insurrection. However preventing the creation of an article about the encryption key, including censoring any discussion of it in their Talk forums smacks of blatant hypocrisy, keeping in mind that they have articles that are much more explicit.
For instance, the Wikipedia article on DeCSS itself has actual SOURCE CODE to DeCSS, links to DeCSS code galleries and technical discussions of DeCSS.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I'm sorry, but I just don't agree:
1. I don't think lawyers are paid to manage the public relations of whatever company.
2. They should advise about the possible _legal_ consequences of their actions, which is something they love doing anyway, and I find no cause to believe they did otherwise.
IAmNotALawyer, but it seems the limitation of scope you propose would bring you into disagreement with the New York Bar Association; adding some emphasis:
Or, in other words, if the lawyers didn't consider this possible unintended consequence, they were either stupid or grossly ignorant, perhaps even to the point of professional negligence. (I expect other state codes have similar provisions.)
I bet they knew fully the possible scenarios, and I bet they couldn't care less if some website made a fuss about it.
But if so, did they feel the same way about it spreading to two million or so web pages around the world? Hopefully for the sake of the poor lawyers involved you're right. If this possible reaction was anticipated, and if it end up affecting the legal merits as to whether the 09F9 key can be called a "trade secret" any longer (which now fails the laugh test), then the decision to take the chosen course of action should have been made by the client.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Really, you need to blame CONGRESS for the laws that are passed. You need to blame the JUDGES (look at the activist judges) who are involved too. Obviously the lawyers who are taking advantage of it are to blame too, but the ROOT of the problem is the law.
It is just like blaming the IRS on April 15th. The problem is Congress and the laws it passes (and in some cases the judges who are incompetent) not the poor IRS agent and agency who are enforcing the mess that Congress created.
It basically says the Constitution only limits the rights that the people had anyway. In other words, if it isn't mention in the Constitution, it can be a right already possessed by the people.
Like the Right to grow food or seek medical treatment.
at the end of his article where he said:
Or perhaps some executives should think for themselves.
First of all, 'fire in a crowded theater' is an opinion, and not a legal predecent, and, second, the written phrase was 'The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.'
In other words, they were setting the standard that speech that, as they explained elsewhere, that presented a 'clear and present danger' to things laws protects. It is illegal to do things you know may result in the death of someone, and hence speech that causes a life-threatening panic can, in fact, be prohibited. This was a crazy restriction on free speech, and was used to outlaw all sorts of speech on the grounds that it could lead to some sort of illegal activity. Even if the person charged wasn't actually advocating anything illegal. (For example, people supporting the Communist party.)
However, this standard was overturned in 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio. The Court held 'that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation'. The standard for prohibiting speech now is if it results in 'imminent lawless action'. Imminent is pretty important there...it's legal to urge the murder of someone at some point in time, but not if they're standing right there and the person you're talking to has a gun and is likely to shoot the man if you urge him to.
Under that doctrine, falsely causing a panic would, possibly, be legal, because it might be indirect enough. You didn't tell anyone to start a panic, and you didn't tell anyone to trample someone else during said panic.
In the real world, almost all uses of this concept in court, both successful and otherwise, have been against people advocating the use of violence against others, and is thus almost completely and utterly irrelevant to anything slashdot discusses, including the DMCA.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
What about just linking to a place where the key is posted? The courts in the DeCSS case wrestled with the proper test to apply when someone links to a location where a circumvention tool can be found. Ultimately, the district court held that an injunction against linking could be issued after a final judgment if a the plaintiff could show, by clear and convincing evidence,
"that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology."
and then earlier in the article, which has a link to Google, they state,
the futile mission of trying to get every instance of at least one key (hint: it begins with 09 f9) removed from the Internet
They just created a link to a site that provide the means, and knew the link would have the information to crack, and they know it's illegal to crack...so all 3 criteria set are met for infringement under DMCA.
I really hate this DMCA. I think it's the stupidest law since prohibition.
"Rights" were essentially defined as inherent actions and beliefs that persist with human nature. I would argue that the right to protect oneself, raise a family, travel unimpeded, work as you want, and believe whatever you want to are the key aspects to define these rights. The fact that the federal government is limited these rights is irrelevant. The Constitution was written so that when lapses such as these occurred the people would have means to restore these rights.
The number is akin to a musket ball: it may be used as an element of a firearm, even designed to have no other use than as a firearm's projectile, but in absence of the other required elements, it's just a useless lump of matter, and sure to become more obsolete over time.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Sadly, I _am_ serious: XP Decay.
Quoth the great pundit: "When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"
You can't make up something like that, really. It's something I just couldn't come up with on my own, even if I were to make up dialogue for a SF story where a Neanderthal is brought to the present and given a computer. It's stuff that just makes you go, "naaah, no user is _that_ stupid."
Turns out that one can even write as some great tech guru for a major magazine and still actually be that stupid. Go figure.
Not to mention that reading the rest of his complaints in that article is enough to make me worry about his qualifications anyway. I mean, being stumped why Windows is suddenly sluggish and he can't even reboot, well, is stuff that I _can_ understand in Joe Sixpack or Jane Grandma who are computer-illiterate. But someone who's a great computer pundit in a major magazine, would be expected to know better. Before you can write why company X should do Y, and what's technically good/bad/ugly about company Z's product, I'd expect one to be the kind of techie that fixes such stuff before breakfast. I'd have forgiven him if it were "look at the stuff mom's computer was doing", but if that's what his computer does and he's stumped, he just told me that he's totally unqualified for the column he writes.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Life needs more saving throws.
Simon and Garfunkel had a song, "Feelin' Groovy", that was quite popular when it was released in the late '60s/early '70s.
Now, I'm not quite as old as you (I'm 52), but I remember the word "groovy" being used for a year or so when I was in High School, until it was supplanted by "far out".